Darkness had scarcely fallen over the Larkin flocks and herd when the former were set in motion. The bells had been removed and the sheep were urged forward at the fastest possible pace.

Riders going by long détours had found a spot on the banks of the river two miles up from the camp of the cowmen where the water was not more than five or six feet deep at most, though of considerable swiftness. It was here that it had been determined the sheep should cross. So, when the last march was begun, the animals were driven at an angle, avoiding all the pits and defenses of the cowmen’s ingenuity.

The herders, some of them on horseback and others on foot, did not speak. The only sounds that rose from the densely packed flocks were the clatter of their hard feet on the earth, the cracking of their ankle bones, and an occasional bawl of protest. But even this last was rare, for the sheep, worn with fast traveling and ignorant of the meaning of the strange things that were happening to them, were half-frightened; and only contented flocks blether much.

Bud Larkin and Sims rode back and forth, one on each side of the dim, heaving line, seeing that the herders and dogs kept their places and preventing any tendency to bolt.

An hour after the start half the distance was accomplished. It was just at this time that Larkin, looking northeast toward the camp of the cowmen, saw a sudden brilliant flash of light, and knew that Lester had succeeded in his daring project. A moment later and the distant rumble of the earth told him of the stampeded horses.

In depriving the cowboys of their ponies Larkin had accomplished a master-stroke, for he had played upon the one weakness of their equipment. A cowboy without his horse is less effective than a seal on land. His boots, tight-fitting and with high heels, make walking not only a difficult operation, but a painful one. Unaccustomed to this means of locomotion, a puncher is weary and footsore within two miles.

Aside from this fact, a cowboy disdains setting his foot on the ground except in a cow town, and even there daring ones sometimes rode their animals into saloons and demanded their drinks. It is a saying that a puncher will chase his horse half a mile in order to ride a quarter of a mile on an errand.

The coup of Lester Larkin had, therefore, left the camp of the cowmen in serious straits. Afraid to chase their animals and leave the camp deserted, as soon as they recovered enough sight to recognize their surroundings they took their places in the trenches to carry on their defense as best they could.

Busy as Larkin’s thoughts were with the duty of getting his sheep safely across the river, his mind occasionally flashed back to the rear of the flock where the cook-wagons were trailing, for there in the company of a friendly sheepman rode Juliet Bissell.

Only that afternoon she had left the Bar T ranch-house, and, directed by one of the men guarding the rustlers there, had set out to find the sheepmen’s camp. Not realizing how fast the outfit was traveling, she had struck the trail far to the rear, and had not overtaken Larkin until just at the time when the sheep were set in motion.

Then she realized her mission would have to wait until a later time. But so sweet and full-hearted had been Bud’s joyful greeting that her faith in him had again returned, and she rode along meekly where he placed her, fond and comforted.

The proprieties of the situation never occurred to her. She knew that she was safe in his hands, and only bided the time when she could pour out her sorrow and pain to him after all this struggle was over.

To Bud her coming had been inexpressibly sweet. He knew by her face that some great necessity had driven her to him, but he did not question her, and with the undisturbed security of a clean conscience he wondered anxiously what had occurred.

At the time when the sheep were half-way to the river-bank there was another movement back at the camp where the cattle had been left. Men there working on schedule started the cattle-drive. But this drive was not at any diverging angle. It led straight forward to the pits and sharpened stakes of the cowmen’s defenses.

Presently the outposts of the force by the ford heard a distant rumbling of the earth. These men on their horses – for they had not been in camp at the time of the flashlight – rode slowly forward and waited. But not long. Nearer and nearer came the sound until there was no more doubt that an animal-drive was headed in their direction.

Slowly they retreated to the camp and gave the warning. Immediately the fire was extinguished, and the punchers, still cursing over their misfortune, loaded every available weapon, breathing a hot and complete vengeance against the men that had outwitted them. Much to their chagrin they now recognized that Skidmore was but a clever member of the enemy, for if he had not been they felt that he would not have accomplished such a speedy and well-planned escape.

Now, as the sheepmen drove their animals nearer and nearer to the pits, they urged them faster until the unhappy creatures, besides themselves at the weird occurrences of a night of terror, were at a headlong gallop.

Suddenly one of the punchers heard that unmistakable accompaniment of running steers and the clashing of horns as the animals with lowered heads charged the works.

“They’re cows!” he yelled. “Don’t shoot!”

But it was too late. The maddened cattle were already at the first pits, plunging in with terrified bellows, or being transfixed on the stakes by the onrush of those behind. The pits were not more than ten feet deep, and only served to check the herd until they were full. Then those following trampled over their dying companions and charged the trenches where the cowboys lay.

“Fire!” yelled Bissell, who was in command, and the guns of nearly seventy men poured a leaden hail of death into the forefront of the heedless cattle.

Larkin’s men by this time had drawn off to see that the havoc ran its course, and when they heard the desperate volleys they turned and rode southwest along the river-bank to the point where the sheep expected to cross.

The cattle, which had been driven in a rather narrow column, continued to come on endlessly. The leaders dropped in windrows, but the followers leaped over them only to fall a little farther on.

Driven by the resistless impulse of these behind, the animals unconsciously appeared like a charging regiment. Nearer and nearer the tide approached the cowboys’ defenses; but now it was coming more slowly because of the dead bodies and the wounded animals that dragged themselves here and there, bellowing with pain and terror.

At last, at the very mouths of the spitting guns the last of the steers dropped, and the few that remained alive turned tail and fled wildly back the way they had come. In front of the trenches was a horrible tangle of trampled, wounded creatures, rearing as best they could and stabbing one another with their long, sharp horns.

“Everybody out an’ kill the ones that ain’t dead!” yelled Bissell, and the cowboys leaped over the breastworks on this hazardous errand of mercy.

“Where are the sheep?” was the question every man asked himself and his neighbor, but no one could reply.

It had been reported to Bissell by the scouts that with the sheep were a body of cattle. Consequently when the steers charged all had expected the sheep to follow. But in all that grisly battle-field there was not a head of mutton to be found, and the punchers looked at one another in mystified wonder.

“They must be crossin’ somewheres else,” said Bissell, wringing his hands in despair. “Oh, blast that man that stampeded them horses!”

The thought was in every man’s mind, for here the beauty of that strategy was made manifest. Uninjured, full of fight, and furious, the forces of the cowmen were helpless because they had nothing to ride, and were utterly useless on foot.

Two miles away on the bank of the river another scene was being enacted.

Here the eight thousand sheep had come to a halt with the leaders on the very bank, and the herders walking back and forth talking to them to keep them quiet. The river was not more deep than the height of a man, but the current was swift and icy with the snows of the far-off Shoshone Mountains.

“Are you ready, boys?” sang out Larkin.

“All ready.”

“Strip and into it, then,” and, the first to obey his own command, he hurried off his clothes and plunged into the frigid river.

Sims, who had devised this scheme from memory of an Indian custom, stood at the head of the leaders to superintend the crossing.

Now the men entered the water by tens, and stretched out in a double line all the way from bank to bank, facing each other and leaving but a scant yard between them.

“Ready?” yelled Sims.

“Ready! Let ’em go!” sang out Larkin.

The chief herder and others heaved the leading sheep into the water between the first two men. These lifted it along to the next pair who shoved it on, swimming all the time. So it came snorting and blatting to the other side and climbed up the bank.

After it came the next, and then the next, and as the work became easier the sheep caught the notion that man had suggested and incorporated it into the flock mind. They took to the water because their predecessors had.

And now the stream of sheep was steady and continuous. The current was swift and the men’s bodies ached and grew numb in the intense cold, but they stood their ground. Only in one place was the water too deep to work, and here they lost a few terror-stricken animals who turned aside from the chain and were swept downstream.

The river between the men was churned like that of a rapid; there was heard the constant slap-slap! of their arms as they smote the water in pushing the sheep along. A man took cramp and clung to a companion until he could kick it out of himself.

At last, though, all the sheep had passed over the river, and Bud Larkin had won!

Then came the getting over of the wagons and camp outfits, all done in the dark, and with scarcely sound enough to be heard a furlong away. As some men worked, others dressed and swam the horses over, leading them in bunches.

Presently, dressed, happy, and glowing with the reaction from his icy bath, Bud Larkin appeared out of the dark beside Juliet Bissell.

“You are the one who has enabled me to do all this,” he said gently. “Now, will you go over with me or will you go down the river to your father two miles away?”

She looked up at him proudly.

“To the victor belongs the spoils,” she said, and lifted her face to him. “Are you going to make me go?”

“Darling!” he cried in the sweet, low voice she loved and drew her to him.

CHAPTER XXIV
THE STORY OF LESTER

Bud’s sleep of exhaustion was ended by the sound of voices calling to one another. So deep had been his unconsciousness that as he slowly struggled back to light and reason he forgot where he was and what had happened.

One thing was certain, the sun had been up a long while, and it was growing extremely hot even under the sheltering cottonwood tree where he lay.

The voices continued to call to one another, and Bud finally sat up to investigate.

On the opposite bank another camp was being made by bow-legged men who wore heavy chaps over their trousers, broad hats, and knotted neckerchiefs. Some of these men limped, and most of them swore at their cramped toes as they went about the business in hand.

A short distance away from where Bud sat some of the sheepmen were lying comfortably on their elbows, chaffing the punchers.

“I allow you cowmen’re gettin’ pretty swell,” remarked one. “They tell me yuh kinder hanker after photygrafts of yerselves. How about it?”

“Better lose a hoss fer the sake of yer good looks than be a comic valentine all yore life, what?” was the drawling retort.

“Mebbe so, but if I’d lost hosses the way you fellers did last night I wouldn’t have enough vanity left no ways to look a pony in the left leg. I’d go to raisin’ grasshoppers to sell to old ladies’ chicken ranches, I plumb would.”

At this sally such a guffaw of laughter greeted the discomfited punchers that they retired from the field for the time being. Larkin grinned with the rest. Then he turned his attention to the little tent set up near by between two trees. He remembered that Julie had slept there and wondered if she were awake yet.

He called her name and presently a very sleepy voice responded, so tender and helpless in its accents that he laughed for joy.

“Lazy girl!” he cried. “Do you know what time it is? I’ve been up for hours.”

“All right; I’ll get up, I suppose. Is breakfast ready?”

“Not quite,” he replied seriously, “but I’ll have the maid bring it in as soon as the eggs are shirred.”

“Bud Larkin, you’re horrid!” she cried. “I don’t believe you have even started a fire. Do you expect me to get your breakfast?”

“It would tickle me silly,” he confessed, unrepentant. “Shall I wait for you? You see the cooks are getting dinner now. Breakfast was over hours ago.”

“Oh, dear, I suppose so! We’re not even married and you want me to cook for you. Oh, dear!”

“Well,” he said, relenting, “I’ll get things started, but you come out as soon as you can.”

So saying he beckoned to Ah Sin who had been waiting for the boss, and gave him a number of orders. Then he thrashed about the river bank as though looking for fagots, while Julie continued pretending to mourn over her hard lot. When at last she appeared, however, and had dashed the sleep from her eyes in the icy waters of the river, it was not to cook, but to sit down at one of Ah Sin’s little tables and eat a glorious breakfast.

“You perfect darling!” she cried happily and ran and kissed Bud though the Chinaman was looking on.

During breakfast she noticed the work going forward on the other side of the river and asked Bud about it.

“The cowmen moved their camp down here opposite us as soon as they could find out where we were,” he explained. “I guess they want to talk with me regarding several matters. I’m pretty sure I have a thing or two to say to them, now that I am out of their clutches.”

“Oh, then my father must be among those men.”

“He must, although I have not seen him. I intend to take you over to him immediately after breakfast.”

Suddenly for the first time, the girl’s face clouded; through their sweet bantering pierced the hideous visage of the thing that haunted her and that she had come to ask him about.

“Talk to me a little while first, will you?” she pleaded. “You know I came to see you for a special reason last night but had no time to discuss it then.”

“Certainly, dear girl,” he replied.

When they had finished eating they strolled a little way up the noisy stream and finally found a cozy nook between two trees. All about them in the succulent grass of the banks and river bottoms they could hear the bells and contented blethering of the flocks; for Sims had determined to rest his animals for a few days before starting again the long trek north.

“Bud,” she began, speaking slowly so as to choose her words, “I am going to ask you questions about things that you have never chosen to discuss with me for some reason I could not fathom. If it is unmaidenly I am sorry, but I must ask them. I cannot stand any more such anxiety and pain as I have suffered in the last few weeks.”

Bud’s features settled themselves into an expression of thought that told the girl absolutely nothing.

“Yes, go on,” he said.

“First I want you to read this note,” she continued, drawing a soiled bit of paper from the bosom of her dress. “A photographer called Skidmore was held up by the rustlers and asked to bring it to the Bar T and give it to me.”

Her hand trembled a little as she held the paper out to him. He took it gravely, unfolded and read it.

Then he smiled his old winning smile at her and kissed the hand she had extended.

“Lies! All lies!” he said. “Please think no more about them.”

She looked at him steadily and withdrew her hand.

“That won’t do, Bud,” she replied firmly, but in a low voice. “What is the thing for which Caldwell blackmailed you three years ago and again this year?”

Bud looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then seemed to recede into thought. She waited patiently, and, after a while, he began to speak.

“Yes, I suppose you are right,” he said. “It is a woman’s privilege to know what a man’s life holds if she desires it. There are but a few rare souls who can marry men against whom the world holds something, and say: ‘Never tell me what you were or what you have done; what you are and what you will be are enough for me.’

“Putting myself in your place, I am sure I should do what you are doing, for I have always told myself that those who marry with points unsettled between them have taken the first step toward unhappiness. Suspicion and deceit would undermine the greatest love that ever existed. Acts in the past that cannot be explained create suspicion, and those in the present that are better unobserved father deceit.”

He paused for a few moments, and appeared to be thinking.

“Do you know who that Ed Skidmore is?” he asked abruptly.

“No; only he was quite nice, and evidently from the East.”

“He is my brother Lester, and he is the man who stampeded the punchers’ horses last night with his flashlight.”

“He is? I should never have suspected it; you are absolutely different in looks.”

“I know we are, or I shouldn’t have risked his life last night. Well, I bring him into this because I have to. He is part of the story. Lester was always a wild youth, particularly after the governor stuck him on a bookkeeper’s stool and tried to make a business man out of him. The boy couldn’t add a column of figures a foot long correctly inside of ten tries. I took to the game a little better than he did, and managed to get promoted occasionally. But Lester never did.

“Father believed, and announced often enough, that anybody that couldn’t add figures and keep accounts had no business to handle money. To discipline Lester, who he thought was loafing when he really was incapable, the governor cut off the boy’s allowance almost entirely and told him he would have to live on his wages until he showed he could earn more.

“Well, Julie, you know what kind of a cad I was back in the old days – rich, spoiled, flattered by men, and sought after by women. (I can say these things now, since I’ve learned their opposites!) Just try to imagine, then, the effect of such an order on Lester, who was always the petted one of us two because he was small and delicate! It was like pouring cold water on a red-hot stove lid.

“Tied more than ever to his desk, Lester wanted more amusements than ever. But he had only about fifteen a week where he had been accustomed to five times the amount. He drifted and borrowed and pledged and pawned, and finally was caught by some loan-sharks, who got him out of one difficulty only to plunge him into three others.

“Although my father had a narrow-gauge mind as far as life in general is concerned, I will say this for him: that he was right in everything he did about business. He had made it a rule of the firm that anybody who borrowed money was fired on the spot. Lester knew this, and, while he would have liked nothing better than the sack, he did not want to disgrace the governor before his employees and all the business world. So he clung along and tried to make a go of it.

“I must confess that I think some of the blame for what followed should be laid at my door. I had been patient with the kid and loaned him money until I came to the conclusion that it was like throwing it down a well. Then I got fond of a certain person” – he paused a moment and smiled at Julie – “and I needed all my money to entertain her properly; so I quit loaning.

“I don’t know whether to tell you the rest or not; it isn’t what I would want anyone else to tell you, even about a perfect stranger, but I think it is right you should know everything if you know anything.”

The girl nodded without speaking.

“In the loan-shark office was a very pretty little girl, and Lester thought he fell in love with her. She had a red-headed cousin and an admirer named Smithy Caldwell, who belonged to a tough gang on the South Side.

“The girl was fond of Lester for a while, but she wouldn’t forsake her friends as he ordered her to, and they quarreled. Her name was Mary, and after the fuss the three friends, together with the loan-shark people, played Lester for a gilt-edged idiot, basing their operations on alleged facts concerning Mary. In reality Smithy Caldwell had married her in the meantime, and Lester eventually proved he had always treated her honorably, though now she denied it.”

“Poor, innocent boy in the hands of those blood-suckers!” cried Juliet compassionately.

“Naturally driven frantic by the fear of exposure and the resulting disgrace of the whole family, the boy lost his head and tried to buy his persecutors off. And to do this he took money out of the safe. But what’s the use of prolonging the agony? Finally he forged my father’s signature, and when the check came back from the bank he tried to ’fix’ the books, and got caught.

“I’ll pass over everything that followed, except to say that the disgrace did not become public. But it broke father’s heart and hastened his death. When that occurred it was found that practically all the estate had come to me, and this fellow Smithy Caldwell threatened to disclose the forgery if I did not buy him off.

“That scared me, because I was now the head of the family, and I handed over two thousand dollars. Then I came West, and thought the whole matter was buried, until Caldwell turned up at the Bar T that night for supper.

“That’s about all. You see, it’s an ugly story, and it paints Lester pretty black. But I’ve thought the thing over a great many times, and can’t blame him very much, after all, for it really was the result of my father’s stern and narrow policy. The boy was in his most impressionable years, and was left to face the music alone. It seemed to age him mightily.”

“But what will happen now?” asked Julie anxiously. “Aren’t the other two still alive? Can’t they make trouble?”

“Yes, but I don’t think they will. I have the drop on Smithy now, and he will either write a full dismissal of the matter for all three of them or he will swing with the rustlers. And if I know my Smithy Caldwell, he won’t be able to get pen and paper fast enough.”

“But can you save him, even at that cost, do you think? The cowmen won’t understand all this.”

“That will rest with your father, dear,” replied Bud, getting to his feet. “Now, let’s go over and see him, for I have something else I want to ask him.”

His face that had been clouded during his recital was suddenly flooded with the sunlight of his smile, and Julie realized for the first time what it had cost him to lay bare again these painful memories of a past he had sought to bury.

When he had helped her to her feet she went to him and laid her hands on his shoulders, looking up into his face with eyes that brimmed with the loosed flood of her love, so long pent up.

“Can I ever be worth what I have cost you to-day?” she asked humbly.

Tenderly he gathered her to him.

“In love there is no such word as cost,” he said.